Orange Juice

I’ve said it before, and others said it before me, but listening to Orange Juice is essentially listening to the blueprint for Noughties indie, and there’s no better document of that than The Glasgow School. This is the sound of a band appropriating sounds, fusing them and creating a genre – a genre that you can hear resonating in much of the music I loved as a teenager. It’s an incredible collection that sounds both progressive and cohesive and, in being so, constantly throws up hints of what Collins and co. were creating. If you’ve ever loved Wild Beasts, The Libertines, Franz Ferdinand, Good Shoes, The Maccabees or any number of UK indie acts of the last ten years, you could do a lot worse than to get hold of this – it’s as enlightening as it is enjoyable.

There are always bands you know you should have heard, but you just haven’t. And that irritates me, because more often than not when you eventually hear that band it becomes abundantly clear why you should have been listening to them all along. This very situation has occurred to me with Orange Juice. I’ve heard their name bandied about so often that it just became one of those recognisable references, but never one I bothered to check out. Well consider me educated, because they’re bloody excellent, and I will be checking them out with haste (luckily Domino have apparently just got the rights to their back catalogue which means reissues are forthcoming).

What amazed me is just how much you can see that those references are really accurate. Too often you get bands referred to as ‘The new [someone]’ and it’s just too loose a description to have any real meaning. However, in this case you can really hear where newer bands have taken reference points. The jangly guitars are very similar in tone to those Good Shoes use, and the fey vocals are a dead ringer for Hayden Thorpe of Wild Beasts at times. So check out Orange Juice and make a quick comparison with the other two tracks, and tell me if I ain’t right.